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“I guess I always thought the villain in an interspecies tragic love-affair won’t be humanity,” Phil says into Dan’s translucent collar-bones one night, on the spaceship bunk-bed that doesn’t really have room for them both. “I guess, maybe, I wanted to believe we can be good, out of our own planet.”
“You are good,” argues Dan, with the certainty and naivety of someone who’s never studied blood and wars in history, who’s never argued over chores as he ate breakfast, death and crime on the news in the lounge, a constant background noise. “You have a conscience. Ethics. You insist on equalizing your chest-organ to your morality and emotions for some reason, which was really fucking strange for me in universal life-forms studies, by the way, but you have it. You’re good.”
“Not enough,” Phil maintains quietly, watches as Dan examines Phil’s palm intently, his own palm shifting and changing to create a clone of it. “Not good enough.”
.
Phil circles suns and orbits asteroids and passes galaxies, Phil learns space, Phil knows the curve and bend and breaking point of the stars in the sky. Phil lands on a planet no one’s ever seen and no one’s ever named after days and weeks and years, and he finally meets them, meets the others.
The others don’t look like humans and they don’t look like animals and they don’t look like anything at all, don’t look like anything fixed. Phil leaves his spaceship and the others morph from undefined shapes into forms that resemble him, in some ways, look nothing like him in others. They take him with them and he exhales onto the inside of his helmet and curls his fingers around his gloves and doesn’t remember to maybe be afraid.
.
In the second laboratory, Dan helps him graph the content of the planet’s air on the four-dimensional screens, says, “These elements create a fucking inorganic compound, see?”, for no real reason. Phil laughs sharply and exclaims, “Stop,” can’t help but smile with the corners of his mouth, never tells Dan he’s using the word wrong, never does anything except chide him in a feeble attempt at civility.
There’s something about curse words Dan takes a fondness to. “They don’t mean anything,” he says, messes with Phil’s nanoelectronics while Phil heats up freeze-dried powders for dinner. “Your people invented words that are utterly meaningless just to make your sentences sound angrier, and now you don’t even use it when you’re angry, you use it justbecause. They are words that are pointless and the way you’re so against them is simply hilarious to me.”
Phil shoves a fork into a tube and shakes his head, doesn’t tell Dan he’s right, doesn’t tell Dan he’s wrong. He offers Dan a forkful of his tube and laughs when he refuses, laughs when he wrinkles his nose, laughs when he kisses him until the thermometers in his suit are buzzing non-stop.
.
They have him talking for hours. About nothing, about everything, sat in a curved seat in a sterile laboratory, just to hear him talk. The scientists in the room move the mouths they created for themselves along with his, imitating his words as he talks about the prime minister and the pharmacy across the street back home and ghosts riding the tube. In an hour, they can speak basic English. In two, they’re on a par with adults.
When his throat goes dry they offer him a glass of artificially-made water, with hands they didn’t have half an hour before. The laboratory contains breathable air that still makes his head spin for the first few moments, and they watch him and he watches them and this isn’t what Phil expected, except maybe it is.
He drinks their water and breathes their air and teaches them words he doesn’t quite hear, and his fingers are tight around the helmet in his lap but he isn’t afraid, isn’t afraid, doesn’t know why. Eventually, they clear the room and clean his seat, and send him over to someone named Dan.
.
In the fourth room on the third floor Dan’s people keep records of every planet they’ve mapped so far, of every energy-source, of every sign of life. Phil discovers they knew of humans far longer than humans knew of anything other than themselves, and he isn’t surprised, not even when maybe he should be.
“There are four-hundred and twenty-six populated planets we know of so far,” Dan tells him casually, waves his hand in front of the scanner to make all four-hundred and twenty-six holograms appear in the air. “We study them as part of our education. We all share a universe, you know.”
Phil knows. He knows, even though he doesn’t, because he certainly didn’t know of these populated planets, because he’s the first human to encounter another life-form in all of humanity’s history. He doesn’t tell Dan this – not because he’s ashamed or worried, but because he doesn’t have to, but because the file carrying the title Earth has everything and anything about them, names and cartography and details Phil’s known and Phil hasn’t, details that describe everything there is to know.
.
He’s not a scientist, Dan introduces himself in the second laboratory, as Phil’s lowered into another seat and Dan slowly grows himself a pair of legs and hair that resembles Phil’s. He’s not a scientist but rather a researcher, because he wanted to know everything and he’s learned everything they could teach him until they could teach him no more, and then he started teaching himself.
Dan would be Phil’s guide, they tell him. He’d make sure Phil’s provided with everything he needs and learns everything he wants and sees everything he’s interested in. He’d escort him, they tell him, and Dan smiles at him with a dimple he’s just created and his too-large hands on his sharp hips and Phil smiles back because he doesn’t know what else to do, because Dan tries to shake his hand and can’t quite control his limbs yet, bursts out laughing when he fails.
.
Dan studies the shape of Phil’s bones, mimics his accent, masters his gait. Dan looks at Phil like he’s the spokesman of all of humanity, and Phil straightens his spine and always watches his tongue and does his best to be good, better, best.
The three moons above them spin faster, blue and gray, and the beetle-shaped being in the transparent case on Dan’s desk watches Phil with twenty careful eyes. Dan looks up from the being, smiles at Phil, looks back down. Phil watches the slant of Dan’s profile and his heart doesn’t skip and his cheeks don’t blush and his palms don’t sweat. He breathes, slow and steady, presses his mouth to Dan’s shoulder, just because.
“There’s nothing to it except loving you,” he tells Dan later, simply, beneath purple-coloured skies. Dan grins and throws one of the spaceship’s radiation-shields at Phil's head, and he’s not human, not human, not at all, but there’s so much of him that is and Phil’s getting lost in it.
.
Dan doesn’t know what to call his own people when Phil asks. “There’s no word for it in the English language,” he frowns, thumbs through another population register in the filesystem on the screen before them. “We don’t call ourselves anything, not the way you do. There’s no separation between species, no humans or animals or plants. We’re all just – we’re beings.”
Back home, in a tiny London flat Phil hasn’t seen in days and weeks and years, he had a collection of a few dozen houseplants. He loved them and he took care of them and his friends raised eyebrows, flicked the leaves, told him, they’re just plants, Phil, not pets.
They weren’t pets and weren’t humans but he loved them nonetheless, because it didn’t matter. Dan calls everything capable of a cycle on his planet beings, and Phil stares at the population register on the screen without seeing and feels his heart beat steadily in his chest, a beat then a second and a third.
.
His commanders call him, twice a month via video, once a week via text. They ask how he’s doing and he gives them detailed reports of biology and botany and geology, sends them photos of enlarged cells, talks and talks and explains, doesn’t say that he’s fallen in love with someone from outer space.
.
And the truth is, well. They never really ask.
.
Dan kisses him one afternoon, with a floating plant in his hands and soil beneath his fingernails. Kisses him with eyes wide open and Phil’s jaw in his palm, pulls away, presses their lips again fleetingly, closes his eyes then goes back to explaining the plant’s energy circulation.
Phil’s toes are numb in his boots and his mouth is red and shiny but Dan doesn’t say anything, doesn’t act like anything’s wrong. The plant is resisting Dan’s hold and Phil touches its stem with hesitant fingers, listens closely, remembers to breathe.
(Later: Dan lets go of the plant and it floats up to the ceiling, and they watch it go until Phil pulls Dan close and leaves muddy fingerprints on his neck as he kisses his mouth dry.)
.
Science-fiction taught him that aliens would be different. That they’d have additional pairs of limbs and antennae growing from their foreheads and they’d be more evolved technologically, maybe, but always less evolved socially. Science-fiction taught him humans are one of a kind because their humanity is what makes them so.
Phil doesn’t call Dan an alien, because he’s not one. He doesn’t call Dan an alien and he doesn’t call Dan’s friends aliens and he doesn’t call the scientists who check up on him every three weeks aliens, because they’re nothing like what science-fiction always taught him, nothing like that at all. Dan’s people are compassionate and curious and friendly, they take care of their own, they take care of others. Dan’s people have technology and they have culture and they don’t have words to describe themselves because they aren’t constantly obsessed with separating themselves from others, aren’t obsessed with creating the boundaries between what is and what isn’t.
On Dan’s planet, Phil learns that humanity isn’t what makes humans so. On Dan’s planet, in Dan’s laboratory and Dan’s house and Dan’s colonies, Phil learns that what makes humans so are themselves, because humans called themselves humans and they called animals and plants and still-life something else, created the borders between themselves and others, sectioned their planet into separated parts and provoked wars between them.
Science-fiction taught him aliens would be lesser than humans. Dan’s planet teaches him that he doesn’t want to go back.
.
It’s not really that Phil falls in love with Dan. It’s not really anything, not really at all. It’s more that Dan shows him molecules humans never knew of and Dan gets excited about every pop-culture fact Phil tells him and Dan’s laughter reverberates between Phil’s ribs and it isn’t really that Phil falls in love with Dan, but rather that suddenly he’s been in love with him all along.
.
An old law on planet Earth Phil’s long since forgotten says, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. He studies rocks and sediment and bacteria on a planet that isn’t his and fucks a man that isn’t human and doesn’t remember to be afraid, even though he should.
But anything that can go wrong will go wrong and eventually, they find out.
.
Long after, on planet Earth: he tells them of Dan and they tell him he’s wrong and his fingers are tight around the helmet he no longer has in his lap but he isn’t afraid, isn’t afraid, doesn’t know why.